Piracy-Schmiracy: The Dark Knight Rakes In the Dough

The Dark Knight made a mind-warping, record-breaking $155.3 million at the box office over the weekend. Thousands of people waited hours in line to sit in a dark room and watch the movie with strangers.

They didn’t have to wait in line, though — they could have watched it at home.

Almost immediately after the movie was released, bootleg copies — shot with handheld camcorders in the theater — became available online. And if those weren’t good enough, there are plenty of digital wide-screen versions available online to anyone who looks around hard enough.

Studio execs argue that piracy will kill the movie business. So how do they justify the raging success of The Dark Knight?

"It looks like another indicator that although piracy does hurt business, on a title-by-title level, it’s a more complicated effect," says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a Beverly Hills media measurement company. "Many top-selling titles are among the most-pirated, but they don’t necessarily underperform in the marketplace just because they’re the most pirated."

A hit is a hit, says Garland, regardless of whether it’s being illegally downloaded. The astronomical box-office numbers from I Am Legend back up that theory. The movie grossed an estimated $256.4 million, despite the fact that a DVD screener was leaked at the same time as the theatrical release.

"That’s an interesting case study, because the DVD release wasn’t scheduled until March [after it was released in December], so you had this tremendous gap of many months between when the pirated copy became widely available and the availability of the commercial copy of the DVD, and of course the movie did very well … theatrically, worldwide and on DVD," says Garland.